02/08/2014

For all the pictures that I publish in this little corner of the Internet there are at least a gazillion that don’t make it. Sometimes they’re just rubbish pictures, all blurry and with a horizon that suggests I’m perpetually too tired to hold my head up straight, or taken a smidgen too late to capture whatever incredible cute thing one of the girls has just done (and you wouldn’t believe how many pictures I have of the girls pulling away from giving each other a hug); sometimes the pictures are just for us, usually because they have family or friends in – or the girls are running around in the nud; and sometimes there isn’t really a reason, they just get lost in the hurly burly.

But there are moments in there that I don’t want to get lost; stories that I want to tell, even if it’s just to write them down for my own memories.

These are outtakes of a sort from our Me and Mine pictures last week. We’d finished supper, finished playing with the remote, and the girls had (as is rather the way now) made an instant sprint for the tripod and the camera.

I’m increasingly certain that I’m bringing up another generation of photographers; they absolutely love taking a photo on the big camera and watching it pop up on the screen behind, and we’re even getting to the stage where Kitty will remember to open one eye and peer through the viewfinder where before she just shut her eyes and put her head behind the camera in the hopes that this mimicry would produce the right sort of magic and take a photo of whatever it was that she actually wanted to capture.

And so with my snap-happy toddlers believing themselves in charge, and H actually in control, I found my camera suddenly contained a whole heap of photos like this:

And then a few like this:

But the ones that I really love are the shots that H took when he sent the girls running back to be in the pictures too. It made me realise in seeing them that for all that we make a real effort to take Me and Mine photos each month, I’m still behind the camera in our family photos more often than I’m in front of it. I’m never really going to be able to change that completely; I love taking photos far too much for that, and my comfort zone is definitely out of the frame; but I’m so glad to have these pictures; memories of ‘squeezy hugs’ that threatened to tip me over,

and moments of simple blissful silliness from all three of us.

And the happy smiles of a family full of good food and time just being together.

Space for the Butterflies is…

A story of motherhood from a slightly hippy working mama who couldn't stop writing if she tried. It's my creativity, set out in fabric, yarn, and cake, our family memories and adventures and all the evidence you need that photography is addictive.
Hi, I'm Carie, welcome to the story so far...